Thompson, Bruce D. No Ordinary Neighbour

Conversations with one of the last surviving Veterans of Hitler's SS

When author and clergyman Bruce Thompson first met his new neighbor, there seemed to be nothing unusual about him. Reverend Thompson, a Christian minister who had dedicated much of his life to Holocaust education, had no inkling of what would come to light in the years ahead. It turned out that this generous, sociable, and friendly neighbor had managed to keep the truth about his wartime service a secret throughout the eight decades he spent in the United Kingdom. Eventually, he was ready to share the reality with just one person: Reverend Thompson. *No Ordinary Neighbour* is the account of a growing relationship that led to an astonishing confession. Over the course of a deepening bond, "Soldier X" gradually revealed his true identity to the author during the final decades of his life. As it turned out, he was one of the last surviving members of the *Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler*. This is a story of guilt, remorse, shame, anger, confusion, and a profound desire for others to understand how easily evil can take hold of the human psyche and society. We are taken from a childhood of poverty in 1920s Berlin to training with one of the elite units of Himmlers SS. We accompany "Soldier X" in the autumn of 1941 on a troop train heading east to the battlefields of southern Ukraine. After surviving two tours of duty on the Russian frontwitnessing some of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War"Soldier X" takes part in the defense of Normandy following the Allied landings (D-Day) in 1944. Captured on the outskirts of Brussels in late summer 1944, "Soldier X" narrowly escapes execution by a British guard while held in a Brussels cell; he subsequently remains a prisoner of war until the end of 1948. This account is shocking and deeply unsettling, though not necessarily in the way many might expect or imagine. What is particularly surprising is just how ordinary "Soldier X" was: he could easily have been anyones popular older uncle. This is no ordinary memoir, but a profound examination of how a young man"Soldier X"could be so readily drawn into a brutal military unit that ranked among the most feared of the Nazi regime.